We made it through the first half of the week! By now, I hope all of you are fully recovered from the weekend and are eager read up on the stories of Rusko’s new album, Kaskade’s aiming to expand the world of dance music, I Love Techno 2011, Zedd’s new video, and coverage of HARD Haunted Mansion. I have a tune for you to jump start your day with, so check it out and read more after the jump.

Rusko Talks Up His Anti Bro-step Album

“Bro-step is sort of my fault,” said hyperactive bass fiend Rusko back in February, before proceeding to bemoan the current state-of-affairs within the scene. “Everybody’s taken it too far,” he told BBC 1. “It’s not about playing the hardest tracks for an hour and a half.”

Fast forward to this week, and the outspoken producer’s position remains unchanged. So much so that his upcoming album – scheduled for a January 2012 release – is set to be a direct reaction to the bro-step boom.

“I turned in my new album three days ago,” he told SPIN backstage at HARD Haunted Mansion in L.A. “It’s completely a reaction to the masculine, dance-floor orientated, distorted mess that is the current state of dubstep. I made 14 tracks with 14 vocalists – songs with choruses that you can sing along to, rather than for DJs to play. It’s the biggest statement I could make, really.”

While Rusko’s certainly dead-on when he mentions his part in championing dubstep’s bastard spawn, the album sounds intriguing. In a typical Tweet from a couple of weeks back, he mused: “Does every new dubstep producer have EXACTLY the same drum-kit and massive presets? Because it sure does sound like it.” Time to bring your A-game, Rusko…

Kaskade Aiming to Expand the World of Dance Music

Kaskade may be one of the leading DJs in dance music today – but he wants to be even bigger. ”I felt empowered by the fact the scene is so huge now and so many people are paying attention,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It made me feel like, ‘This is the time for me to try something new. I don’t have to collaborate with the Black Eyed Peas. I can do something that’s unique and special to my sound.’ I’ve always kind of gone on my own path and I don’t follow the trend right now.”

Last week, Kaskade (real name: Ryan Raddon) released a double CD, Fire and Ice, that he calls the culmination of his 10 years on the scene. “It was a big undertaking to do a double disc. I think that’s why I feel like, ‘Man, a decade later this is where I’m at,’” the 40-year-old says. “It’s been a wild ride. I feel like as an artist I’ve changed and grown over the last 10 years and doing the Fire and Ice concept gave me a lot more room as an artist to stretch out.”

As a result, he’s brought in some unexpected collaborators, like Neon Trees. “I dig what those guys were doing and I remixed ‘Animal’ a year and a half ago,” he says. Plus, it turns out they had a mutual connection: Bass player Branden Campbell is married to a college friend of Raddon’s. “We hung out, I got to meet Tyler [Glenn] and we had a lot of mutual friends, so it was cool. And I just wanted to be able to do something that was fun and unique and fit with their sound and my sound, but wasn’t as obvious.”

Another guest is current collaboration queen of the moment Skylar Grey, but Kaskade says her radio success with the likes of Eminem and Dr. Dre had nothing to do with why he wanted to work with her. “I immediately gravitated towards her voice and her writing style,” he says. “She could’ve been my neighbor and I would’ve been like, ‘Man, this girl’s got an amazing voice. I need to work with this person.”

The album hit Number Four on the iTunes albums chart last week. “I don’t want to make a record that can only be listened to at two a.m. I wanted it to say more, to be musical, to stand up on its own so somebody who might not know about dance music or might not listen to it all the time would still be able to put it on and be like, ‘Man, this whole thing is interesting.’”

Watch Skrillex Signee Zedd’s New ‘Shave It’ Video

Three dudes in black wearing burlap masks break into a closed-door warehouse party. The bass burbles and burps. Inside they find themselves surrounded by a sea of ladies unlike any you’ve (read: we’ve) seen before. They are not there to socialize. Instead, they grab the bearded don in the corner and take him for a ride. The bass remains impolite, they’re all headed somewhere outside of town, it’s all a little unclear. So (sort of) goes the new visual for “Shave It”, a dubstep-ish cut from German electro-house producer (and recent Skrillex signee) Zedd.

Well it is probably not just you, but it certainly isn’t a lot of us! I don’t credit a producer’s/DJ’s live show on what he mixes or doesn’t mix. He wrote most of the fucking music for god’s sake. He is “playing” it just like any one would play their own songs.